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Anyone pick up Chaos Wars? (Fantasy SRW w/ a bunch of JRPG chars)
KiTA
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
How the hell did this slip through the cracks?
It's a crossover SRPG by Idea Factory that uses characters from...
Gungrave
Spectral Force
Gakuen Toshi Vara Noir
Spectral Souls
Hametsu no Mars
Shinsengumi Gunraw Den
And...
OH YEAH:
Growlanser
Shadow Hearts
So... Um, anyone pick this up? My copy arrived today but Persona 3 FES and Everquest are keeping me away from it.
Offical Website.
And... who the hell is O~3 Entertainment?
It's a crossover SRPG by Idea Factory that uses characters from...
Gungrave
Spectral Force
Gakuen Toshi Vara Noir
Spectral Souls
Hametsu no Mars
Shinsengumi Gunraw Den
And...
OH YEAH:
Growlanser
Shadow Hearts
So... Um, anyone pick this up? My copy arrived today but Persona 3 FES and Everquest are keeping me away from it.
Offical Website.
And... who the hell is O~3 Entertainment?
KiTA on
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Posts
they made chaos field (shmup for the DC and gamecube) and konductra
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HBDAeysrb0
Japanese Character Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1C7pRaq_mM
Japanese Gameplay Trailer
Serious NIS vibe coming from this, heh.
The game system is basically entertaining. It's a standard SRPG system with the following features:
- Free movement as in Phantom Brave, although they didn't bother to do the computational geometry to display movement ranges shortened around obstacles, so sometimes the display says you can move to a place, but you can't. Also some abilities won't trigger based on your relative altitude to the enemy, but there's no way to find that out in the user interface. Since you can cancel movement if you haven't acted yet, this isn't usually a problem.
- Active-time battle as in Final Fantasy Tactics (rather than player-phase, enemy-phase), but with much finer time resolution; a character's wait time depends on the distance they moved and the specific action they took, although there are not enough ways to see the exact wait time for a given action.
- HP and SP recharge some every round. Damage taken is divided into temporary (red; most of each hit) and permanent (black) damage. Red damage will heal over time at a certain rate that depends on your statistics; black damage stays until healed by ability or item, or the battle ends. So you must gang up on your enemies to take them down -- a one-on-one duel is a slow, tedious process. This is made easier by
- Several mechanics allow characters to act outside their turn in exchange for a unit of "S gauge", which is built
up by dealing or taking damage. The most important one is a team attack: when one character acts, other characters with at least one S-gauge unit, and enough SP to use one of their abilities, can spend one S-gauge unit to act immediately afterward against the same target. You can chain all five of your active characters this way if you have enough SP and S-gauge. Some characters also have an evade-and-counter ability which consumes S-gauge to act on an enemy turn.
- Conserving SP is important, because there is no vanilla "Attack" command. Every ability a character uses must be equipped and consumes SP to use, which limits the number and strength of attacks you can use until your turn comes around again and recharges some of your used SP. Abilities master slowly over time, and can be unequipped and transferred to another character, retaining their accumulated mastery points. Unfortunately there is one extremely annoying wrinkle in this system:
- Occasionally equipped abilities randomly (permanently) mutate when you use them -- not in general to something much better or worse, just different. The problem with this is that, at least as far as I've gotten, there is no shop where you can buy new abilities, which means something you found useful may be gone forever. I've restarted a battle because one character had (among others) Sword Attack (5 SP, standard attack) and Cross Cut (7 SP, slightly stronger), and the Cross Cut decided to mutate to a second Sword Attack. You can "lock" abilities so they never mutate, so I just went through and locked all my characters' abilities. I think this is a very stupid game mechanic.
- Characters can spend one S-gauge unit to enter a "Realize" mode, which is a lot like Yuri's fusions from Shadow Hearts, although each character only has one: your stats are substantially boosted and you acquire one special (very expensive in SP) ability, but you can only stay in this mode for a few turns, typically three. If you're making enough S-gauge from attacks, you can re-enter Realize on the turn after you leave it.
- There are no discrete experience levels; instead characters' abilities may randomly improve a tiny bit each time they act, and each character is assigned a "Rank" based on their total ability improvement. I haven't yet figured out what gives each character's improvement profile its distinctive shape, or whether I can turn a mage into an effective swordfighter merely by having her practice swordfighting. A character's rank is not always a good guide to their relative strength.
So, what are the problems?
- The plot, so far, is a nonentity. I was more or less expecting that.
- The graphics are done about to the NIS standard, which is okay in a game with NIS's sense of style, but I don't think Chaos Wars quite measures up to that.
- The music varies from "acceptable, but already overused after five hours" (the turn theme associated with the main original characters, Hyoma and friends) to "hey, that was good in the original game, but it doesn't sound quite as good here" (the Shadow Hearts characters' turn theme) to "brain-sucking elevator music" (the background music of your base while you're not doing anything else). It's really disappointing.
- You seem to be expected to do at least a few grinding random battles in between story episodes. Unfortunately, the grinding battles are, so far, completely formulaic and uninteresting random maps with predictable enemies that have uniform sets of abilities. No interesting tactical situations, no real challenge. The story battles are not much better, although Gaizan (the fourth or fifth story battle) at least hit hard enough to make me think for a moment.
- Every time you choose a mission (either a plot mission, or a random-battle mission) from your home base, the list of available missions is freshly randomized when you get back: the only thing that is guaranteed stable is the next main-plot mission. This jars my suspension of disbelief somewhat, and makes it impossible to do two missions each of which you'd like to try.
- The game is slow in several senses. The system requires a lot of button presses to execute each action, and you have to explicitly select "Standby" at the end of each character's turn. If it's not the most button-pushy RPG I've ever played, it's close. It also chugs like a dyspeptic pig: many, many actions cause perceptible loading delays, including a bunch that have no business doing any such thing (the game has to load the tiny little animation from disc when a character pops into or out of Realize mode). And the delays for things you do expect delays for, like memory card checking or saving, or loading a new level, are longer than they should be. It's irritating, and all adds up to a substantially lower fun-to-time-spent ratio.
- The translation isn't bad like Symphony of the Night, but it isn't great. I haven't even tried the English voices -- this game isn't from an A-list publisher or Atlus, so I assume they're terrible. Although my Japanese is limited and rusty, it's good enough to reveal that the English script translation, in addition to not flowing that well in English, often fails to convey either the literal or the idiomatic meaning of the original text. (For instance, when a samurai character joins you near the beginning, his last line, "Kochira koso, yoroshiku onegai shimasu" becomes "Thank you for your offer to join swords." I can maybe see what they were thinking, but, uh, no.)
- The voices also vary wildly in volume even within the same character's part in the same scene, so that one line can be at the proper level and the next is too muffled to hear over the background music. That's just sloppy.
- Finally, the localizers apparently didn't bother to look up the spelling of characters' names in origin games that have appeared over here, so instead of Yuri, Karin and Nicolai from Shadow Hearts 2, I see Uru, Karen and Nicole before me. Again, just sloppy.
- I've already encountered one really egregious (but not gameplay-affecting or save-destroying) bug: in your home base, when you walk up to the encyclopedia wall, sometimes the background graphics for the book pages appear completely garbled, which makes the text impossible to read. Walking around and doing something else for a moment (like browsing the available missions, or talking to another character in the base) often fixes it. But seriously, how does this get past QA?
So, the bones may be good, but there are so many defects in execution that it's really not that fun to play. It's too bad, because I was looking forward to seeing Yuri and friends in another game (really bought this for them -- I haven't finished Growlanser II, or really started III or V, and those are the only other titles I own that might have characters in Chaos Wars). But my verdict is, if you haven't already bought it, don't put yourself to the (apparently considerable) trouble of finding it.
Anyone who keeps up with JRPGs knew that this was coming.
Anyone with a gaming magazine knew this was coming.
...as for it being considered "bad"... well, that's usually how they are in mash-ups.
It's mostly for fan-fiction's sake.
I'm buying it for my gf, since my gf LOVED Growlanser... and she's been looking forward to this game for a long time.
I would recommend waiting for all the DS SRPGs coming out this summer, before spending money on this.